Tipjip wrote:In 2.1.18 under Windows 7 32bits I can't open the "about"-dialogue. When I try nothing happens. So, technically, I'm not sure it really is the 2.1.18 I'm trying it with because I installed it over an older version.

Tipjip wrote:In 2.1.18 under Windows 7 32bits I can't open the "about"-dialogue. When I try nothing happens. So, technically, I'm not sure it really is the 2.1.18 I'm trying it with because I installed it over an older version.

I should have brought that one with me on my lastest trip. Anyway here's a question which I think I saw answered before, but I did not find the answer in a search. One of the reasons I got the merlin was to deal with the issue of APP being unable to find control points on regions of sea and sky in gigapanos. However, in assembling some I find two fairly odd behaviours.

Everything looks right in the import window, but after the initial pass, there are two big problems with the result which I include shots of below. On both this pano, and one without the sea/sky issue, APP initially delivers the pano with the center in void space. It is not a 360 pano, but as you can see it has made it appear like two halves left and right.

Using the center button can correct the problem (as well as curving and slope -- I wonder if the level on my Merlin is not quite right as I make sure to level before shooting but the image in the viewfinder is clearly not level) But as you can see it has not linked the lake images in the bottom row except the two at the right, and none are connected to the main pano. I recall suggestions for setting the detection or optimization. Or is this related to setting or not setting the reference position when starting up the mount? Is that something that must be done each time?

(Editing to add I now see this is likely the problem based on the report that it thinks the pitch goes from -15 to -45. Does the yaw range cause the strange centering?)

In this case, because people will forget, it might be nice if there were an option on the import to correct the pitch and yaw values by making a rough guess as to where zero/zero was. In many cases this might be done by pointing to a specific picture and saying the 0,0 value should really be in that picture or to get fancy a specific point in that picture. GUI not really needed, I would be happy to calculate percentage coordinates, as in "real center is x=40% y=60% in picture Z"

Last edited by bradtem on Wed Jun 23, 2010 8:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I think the low row of images is due to the bad pitch range. I just turned on the unit wherever it was, and in most cases hand positioned to the one corner then arrow positioned to the other corner, so the pitch and yaw ranges are all wrong.

The pitch range being all wrong makes it think the bottom row is way down low at -45 and so it is curving it. It would, I would guess, curve all the rows if it was not finding the control points in the first 3 rows.

I have a harder time understanding why the yaw error would matter though. So the image goes from 112 to 219. It's not a 360 degree image so there is no real center in the horizontal range -- it should just be an image. I don't understand why under any circumstances an image would want to be rendered as two halves with a blank zone in the middle as it is with the initial centering.

I can provide the thumbs but I think I understand the situation now. For those who do not set the reference (though I will try to remember to do that now) it would be nice to have an option to tell the import wizard where the real horizon was (again for non-360 I don't see a need to have to say what the center in yaw was, there is no other center for a non-360 pano) so it can adjust the pitch, that would be handy. I guess I could write a little script to read in the XML and modify the yaw and pitch numbers to provide the real values though.

BTW I ran into another problem with using the merlin which is not its fault but meant I had to stop using it. My camera developed an odd defect, where every 15 shots or so it would fail and display "Err 20" forcing me to reset the camera. Of course when this happened when shooting on the Merlin I had to notice it, pause the pano, reposition the pano back a few pictures (to be sure I re-took the bad image) and restart it. This was enough of a pain that I just switched to using a manual pano head for the rest of the shooting day. The problem went away but I sent my camera for service anyway. There's no really practical way that papywizard could help here. I suppose if there were a key that said "That shot failed" that you had to press twice (you need to be able to get to it fast) it would have helped. In manual mode it was easy, since I would just take it, hear the sound of the failure (the shutter sounds different) and then just press the shutter again to reset, and then press it again to retake, and I was on my way.

Papywizard did help me get some very nice panos but the amount of extra time it took remains disturbing. In addition, since I don't yet have a Nokia 800, hauling the camera gear, the tripod, the merlin and my netgear up to the top of the moraine was quite a bit of inconvenience. I may end up using the merlin only for shots of 500mpix and up from locations where you can park the car next to the shooting location.

I will say that the Merlin did attract a lot of attention from people walking by though, since I would be sitting down with the netbook and it was doing its thing via bluetooth.